EA games officially come to Steam, sans DRM

After a year's worth of DRM blunders that set off protests from PC gamers, EA …

One of the biggest stories in gaming this year was the ugly DRM enforcement that accompanied the release of EA's Spore. Will Wright's long-awaited life simulation was marred by a disgraceful DRM debacle that led to one of the most significant online protest campaigns ever started by gamers. The message was clear: gamers did not like SecuROM and, more generally, DRM. Perhaps in an effort to win back PC gamers, EA has now made its big 2008 titles available on Steam without third-party DRM.

As of today, Spore (and its first expansion), Warhammer Online, Need for Speed Undercover, Mass Effect, and FIFA Manager 09 have joined Crysis, Crysis: Warhead, and SiN Episodes: Emergence as part of the collection of EA-branded titles available through Valve's digital distribution platform. Prices are comparable to retail, but the bonus here is that none of the games are packaged with any third-party DRM. The product pages for each game reveal that all traces of the much-loathed SecuROM have been eradicated.

More EA releases will follow this first batch. It has already been confirmed that Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, and Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 are coming to the platform, and it seems as though EA intends to release its future titles on Steam as they launch.

"We are pleased to extend our holiday titles to gamers worldwide via Steam—a revolutionary technology that is one of the game industry's most successful digital distribution services," said John Pleasants, President of Global Publishing and COO of EA. "EA is one of the industry's largest publishers," Valve's Gabe Newell continued. "The EA titles coming to Steam this holiday include some of this year's top PC titles."

This move follows other, less successful attempts to respond to complaints about EA's use of DRM. The company first tried to save face after the Spore backlash by reducing the abrasiveness of the SecuROM implementations in its other software. Shortly after the release of Spore, EA released Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 will a slightly toned down form of SecuROM. Instead of 3 installs, players would be given 5. A number of gamers, however, were not placated.

EA's presence on Steam seemed like an impossibility at one time, as the company maintains its own digital distribution system through its website. The EA Download Manager allows gamers to purchase EA games directly from the company and download them through EA's servers. However, the thought of having EA software on their systems has proven unattractive to most hardcore PC gamers. The move to Steam gave EA the opportunity to change its approach, and the new offerings have, for the most part, received praise from gamers and critics alike thanks to its relatively non-intrusive DRM scheme and strong community features.

With EA on board, Steam has added a large notch in its belt. EA joins a long list of huge third-party publishers to be on the platform, including its foremost rival, Ubisoft, and it seems likely that others will follow suit. For EA, though, this decision to drop DRM on its Steam options should go a long way towards helping it recover ground lost in the wake of the bad DRM decisions it made during the year gone by.